Drill Better Baby!

By Lisa Margonelli

On Wednesday President Obama stole Sarah Palin's
football
when he spoke of a plan to open 167 million square miles of offshore territory to oil drilling. This spring, when gas prices inevitably rise,
Sarah and the Republicans will not be able to demand that we "Drill,
Baby, Drill," because Barack already has. In this at least, opening
offshore oil was a smooth preemptive move. But if that's all it
accomplishes it will have been a waste--there's no way this will lower
gas prices, or make the U.S. more energy secure in the long term.
Politically, offering up the
coast has to be a bargaining chip to get climate change
legislation--whether it brings some balky legislators to the table, or
produces some income from royalties that makes the cost of climate
legislation more palatable.

While
many environmentalists are enraged by Obama's move, I think THEY should
steal Obama's football to get even bigger gains for the environment.

Personally, I can't get too upset about the possibility of drilling
off the coasts. While I love walks on unspoiled beaches, I don't
believe we in the U.S. have any special right to them given our current
consumption of petroleum. We have less than 3 percent of the world's
oil reserves, and we use 25 percent of the daily production. All that
oil comes from someone else's beach: Angola, Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Nigeria, Chad, Russia, Kazakhstan-- places without our environmental
protections, rule of law, or human rights record. In my mind, keeping
the coasts off limits here without dramatically curtailing our
consumption inevitably leads to drilling more wells in Nigerian
villages, soon to be followed by spills, poverty, violence, and worse.
If an oil company spills even a small amount of oil off the coast of
Virginia the active citizens of the Commonwealth will force them to
account for their actions and pay compensation.

(Wondering how frequent offshore drilling spills are? The Norwegians
keep a database named SINTEF of all offshore blowouts from oil and gas
exploration for the U.S., and the Norwegian and U.K. North Sea, showing
that they're less frequent than they once were. Google that analysis,
or go here to see some of the worst blowouts in history.)

The environmental community should give up its usual opposition to
federal money for drilling research and instead try to change drilling
itself. First, get more funding for research into how to safely get
more oil and gas out of old wells in parts of the country that are
already heavily drilled. One in six barrels of oil produced in the U.S.
is from such old wells, but the feds spend only $1 million a
year investigating how to increase that yield. For comparison, we spent more than $1 billion on gasoline yesterday.

Another opportunity to change the way drilling is done would be to put
more money into figuring out how to extract unconventional natural gas
with less water, safer drilling muds, and better fracking fluids.
Instead of choking off funding, perhaps we should embark on a five-year
plan with the industry to substantially reduce the environmental impact
of such drilling. At the moment, such initiatives receive very little
funding. (Though the EPA also has a program.)

Cynics are likely to argue that investing in oil and gas technology
helps the oil industry more than the environment. But with many years
of fossil fuel dependency ahead of us, we need to have higher
expectations of the industry. Investing in the right kind of research
is one way to establish those expectations.

Plus, the strongest argument against coal, nuclear power, and LNG
terminals has been the discovery of massive amounts of "unconventional"
natural gas in the U.S. over the last ten years. What made producing that gas possible? A modest $185 million investment
in unconventional gas technology in the early 1980's, which was then
modified by the gas industry itself over the years. But simply drilling for that gas will have huge environmental effects unless we can find ways to do it better.